Her Lonely Angel
by Destinies Trek
Summary: The crew has lost someone: a little girl. When they can't find her, they assume the worst...but when she finally turns up, they realize that the worst case scenario might have been what they should have been hoping for.


**Disclaimer:** Okay, I know it's been a while since I've posted _anything_, (for those of you who even bother to care) but I've been busy for the past...year or so. Any who, here's a little something that I've been working on for a while. As always, I don't own either Star Trek or Doctor Who, nor any of the characters there in so, **DON'T SUE ME!**

_Err err. "Zero-two thirty-three hours; regeneration cycle incomplete."_ Said the computer as Seven of Nine stepped out from her alcove. She glanced around the darkened cargo bay with a mixture of caution and curiosity.

"Computer," She said as she stepped down from her alcove and up to the closest workstation. "Run a level five diagnostic on all regeneration alcoves." Something had interrupted her regeneration cycle; some kind of power surge she had felt pulse through the primary coils just before she had awoken. What disturbed her most about it was that it felt like it hadn't come from the ship itself.

"Working...diagnostic complete; All regeneration alcoves are functioning normally." Replied the computer monotonously. Seven couldn't believe what the computer had just told her; she _definitely_ felt the surge, and she was sure that there were more than one, and now that she knew this, she was certain that it's origin wasn't from the ship itself. So, without hesitation, she reached up, and briskly tapped her commbadge.

"Seven of Nine to main engineer-" A loud whine sounded from the other side of the bay, one that she wasn't familiar with, so she stopped mid-sentence and turned to face the source of the sound. Carefully stepping around the consol, and making sure to grab the phaser that she always kept hidden just beneath the side work-platform as she carefully moved toward the anomaly. Keeping it pointed squarely ahead as she slowly moved closer to where she'd heard the strange sound, she called out:

"Whoever is there, please identify yourself." The Doctor had taught her in their last lesson, which the opportunity for courtesy can exist in every situation that she may encounter, no matter who she was interacting with. Even though whoever may be in her cargo bay might not even care about such courtesy, the Doctor had also taught her that manners could sometimes be enough to diffuse a volatile situation. Personally she didn't really see any point in using such things; they're nothing more then arbitrary inefficient means of communicating information, but she had to give it a try if not for the Doctor's benefit. Then she saw a familiar and small head pop-up. The former Borg drone dropped her guard at the sight of the child.

"Sorry Seven…it's only me," said the small girl. Naomi Wildman; she'd suddenly gone missing several days ago, and the entire ship was on alert looking for her. Seven was especially worried about it, she was even the first to have noticed that she was gone, when she hadn't showed up in the Astro-metrics lab with her Kadis-kot set as she usually does at the end of her shift. The light shinned gold within her hair, and held onto what little light held the room. At the very first sight of the girl, Seven breathed a sigh of relief that she was safe, but Naomi's face told a much different story. This fact wasn't lost on Seven so she lowered her phaser, and motioned for the girl to come closer.

"Naomi Wildman, where have you been these past four days?" Seven asked worriedly, partially in order to find out where she'd gone and then to see why she was so upset. Naomi peered up to her, and she saw her eyes; swollen red from crying. Seven felt something inside of her twist at the sight; she wasn't used to seeing her favored pupil this upset, but she kept her cool head level as she bent down to her level. She had expected Naomi to lunge and wrap herself around Sevens shoulders, but when she didn't, the former Borg drone began to worry.

"He's...gone," Naomi said, looking down at something she was holding in her hands. Seven tried to get a closer look at the device, but the closer she got the more details she picked up on Naomi's welfare. Her clothes were torn, dirty and even burned in a few places. Dozens if not more cuts and bruises were littered all over her body, and she looked incredibly tired and dehydrated. Then the smell hit her; the familiar scent of burning metal, charred flesh and ozone. In fact, if Seven hadn't known any better, then she might have guessed that she'd just been brought back from a battlefield.

Drying her tears, she spoke again. "He-he saved my life," she said. Her voice broke as she spoke; "...they burned, and-and he burned with them!" The tears broke out again, and she collapsed on Seven's lap; sobbing uncontrollably. The former drone didn't know what to do; she hadn't seen Naomi cry since she was still a little girl, and even then, she'd never been forced to face anything that could just make her collapse like this...not even when her mother nearly died when the Delta Flyer had crashed. She was a strong person by nature; she's a culmination of the entire crews strengths and weaknesses; very definition of _Voyager_. She had faced things that only the most experienced of Starfleet officers had encountered before she was even old enough to read, and even those things had only just been able to phased her...at least when compared to this. Then the heavy sound of the bays doors sounded and Seven could hear the sound of heavy footsteps clicking against the deck, making their way towards the pair.

Relief flowed over her as a shadow appeared from around a corner, flashing a torch mounted atop of a phaser rightful. "Over here!" The figure shouted to the rest of the group. She lowered her light, and Seven was able to see the guards face; she's a Bajoran crewman called Nark Vela. She crouched down before them to take Naomi's vitals, but the little girl refused to let go. When Seven saw Tuvok's head peer around a stack of cargo container along with another security guard and a medic, something within told her that she shouldn't let Naomi go just yet.

**~xXx~`~XXXX~`~xXx~**

Naomi laid motionless on the Biobed; her more serious wounds already dressed and repaired, but there was even more that would need to be addressed when she awoke. Her mother, ensign Wildman stood over her, watching her carefully with all of the care and gentle protectiveness of a mother finally soothed and calmed. Seven stood behind the glass of the Chief Medical Officer's office along with The Doctor, commander Chakotay, and Neilex on the other side of the Sickbay.

"She's incredibly dehydrated and malnourished," he began, shooting a glance over to the biobed. If he had a real heart, then it would be breaking just like everyone else's in the room, including Seven's. She had been the one to find her, and in the past hour or so since she simply just reappeared, she had been experiencing things that she just can't quite describe.

"...And her wounds?" Asked the commander, bringing everyone back to the room. The Doctor returned his attention back to the trio standing around him.

"I'm not quite sure how to describe them commander. Though from what I've seen, none of them were at all serious." There was something else though, and everyone could see it; something that the Doctor was holding back. Neilex was the first to vocalize it.

"But..." He began. The Doctor swallowed hard as he looked at the three.

"I took the liberty of running a full neural scan on her, and...according to her rate of cellular division as well as new memory formation, she's only aged a little more then sixteen hours since she disappeared." Seven's mouth fell open in shock for a fraction of a second. She'd been missing for nearly a week, so how can her aging processes be so off? Chakotay was about to ask that very same question, Seven could tell, but a loud shout range out through the main sickbay before he could.

"DOCTOR!" It was Naomi, she was awake; sitting up on the biobed, and breathing heavily. Her eyes were filled with tears, and she was looking around the room for something. The quartet shot each other a quick glance before they all went to her bed-side; the EMH taking the lead.

"I'm hear Naomi, what is it?" The Doctor asked her, but she just turned away from him. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself down.

"Sorry...I-" She shook her head in an attempt to calm herself down. "I wasn't calling you." She swallowed hard, and tears started streaming down her cheek again. Not calling for him?

"Then, who were you calling Naomi?" She asked, but, she didn't respond. Instead, she just continued to stare off into nothing.

"It doesn't matter anymore...he's dead." There was so much pain in her eyes; a pain that Seven knew all too well. It was the same pain that she'd first felt when they had returned some of the children back to their families. Something within the former drone wanted to help consol her pain, but she didn't know how. So instead, she decided to help in the only way she knew how...

"Naomi Wildman, please tell us what happened." The girl broke her gaze with a single, smooth motion to replace it with Seven. She shuttered involuntarily and a fresh wave of tears began streaming down her cheeks, but with another breath, that all disappeared and her eyes became as stoic in a way that only Tuvak and Seven herself could muster; possibly, even more so. She was sealing away her emotions; holding them back just so that she could speak.

"He saved he-That man, he called himself The Doctor...The Doctor, and the Time War." Her face began to crack again; the barrier which she had created to hold back the flood of pain and sorrow was faltering. Still, with the wiping away of some of her fallen tears, she continued.

"Those creatures...they were going to try to take _Voyager_! They were going to use the ship as a means of escape from the war's Time-Lock! Slaughter the crew, and use it to help reseed their civilization," she finally broke her gaze with Seven's and began locking it with everyone else. A spark was in her eye that set the ex-drone on edge as she continued: "But then they stopped them; The Doctor's people. When they discovered what their enemy was planning on doing, they decided to the same for themselves. But something went wrong; they got me instead." Her mother began stroking her hair as she too began to cry. Something strange was happening; the more Naomi spoke, the more this feeling of pain and sorrow and loss crept up on her. One look to the others showed that it wasn't just her either. She was forgetting something, but for the life of her, she couldn't remember what.

Then the girl locked eyes with her again. "Sixteen worlds," She said. "...a hundred million ships," Her voice was cracking again. "Three trillion people; all of them on fire!" The tears had finally broken the surface again, and now she was crying freely, yet still, she choked out more. "Every one of them burning! All of them dead...all within the span of a minute." Those feelings were now over whelming her; Seven couldn't even bare to keep her eyes open. She tried, but it didn't help; no matter what she did, she could still see them; faces, peoples, places she didn't recognize. Some incredibly advanced, and others just on the brink of enlightenment. Then there was something else; a strange noise. At first Seven mistook it for the sound of the collective, but then she realized that there was something much different then that voice. When the collective spoke, it was like hearing a symphony of voices speaking as one, but this sound was far different. These voices didn't speak like a chorus; instead they talked with a sense of hate. And through all of the clatter of the fog, she could hear a single phrase-no, it's a word. Just one word: Exterminate.

**~xXx~`~XXXX~`~xXx~**

Captain Jainway stared at the group seated around the conference table in the briefing room. All of them were Starfleet officers or at least had the equivalent training. Each and every one of them had been through hell and back together, just like every other crewmember on board her ship. But the one thing that set her on edge was the over-whelming sadness and fear that radiated from each of them. Even Seven of Nine, whose steeled emotional barrier usually rivaled that any Vulcan's, including Tuvok's, was now long forgotten as trails of dried tears streaked down her face. A visage that each of them shared in one way or another. For Chakotay and Neilex, one seemed like the walking dead with eyes darkening and starting to bag, while the other seemed to be unable to stop trembling. Then there was The Doctor; regardless of the fact that he was a hologram, he seemed to be fairing the worst out of all of them. His face or body-language alone may not have indicated that he was being affected on such a level as his ship mates, but one look into his eyes told you anything that you wanted to know...or in this case, wish you didn't. Then the captain locked her gaze upon Naomi, the little girl they all had been searching for. Just standing there, alone in the corner of the room, staring out the window at the stars.

"So," she began, deciding that anything was better then weathering the oppressive silence that permeated the room. "Let's start again, from the begging-"

"No captain!" Said Seven with her voice cracked. "Please, don't make us go any further." Jainway could feel the pain that the woman was fighting to hold back as she spoke, but she needed to know. What could have been so horrifying-so terrible that it could break down her senior staff like this? 

Then Naomi spoke: "War." The group turned to the young girl, still standing at the window, never budging from her spot against the wall. Then finally, she broke her line of sight with the stars beyond, but with a single look into her eyes, Kathryn began to wish that she hadn't.

"War?" Asked Harry Kim. The rest of her command crew was present as well, but each of the officers seated here, aside from the captain herself, he had been the only one to speak up since the meeting had begun. Naomi's face remained still with his question...

"The Time War." The young hybrid said with pain and malice in her voice. She's changed so much in the past few days since she disappeared. She's grown; become stronger...and, she's become so much sadder.

Then Tuvak finally spoke up: "Time War?" There was a question there, but her Vulcan tactical officer didn't ask it; instead, allowing the silence that preceded his repetition of the phrase speak it for him. To her surprise, the teen-aged girl nodded her head in understanding.

"It was a struggle between two incredibly advanced races: The Time Lords...and the Daleks." Her voice began to harden with the utterance of the two names, and to be honest, the captain herself couldn't help the shiver that they both sent up along her spine. Anything whenever it came to time-travel always put her on edge, and as far as she could tell, this was the mother-load of worst-case scenarios that were possible. A silence hung in the air, so Naomi continued...taking the stillness as a prompting voice from both the crew and herself.

"The Time War raged...completely invisible to lower life, but devastating to higher forms. Time lines begin altered and changed, whole planets and civilizations being destroyed, erased, and restored only to be wiped out all over again the next day. Sometimes they might even be conscious it, and sometimes they weren't." She turned back to the window, fixing her eyes on the same patch of space; a bright collection of stars tightly packed into a globular cluster. Though Kathryn Jainway knew better then to just say that and call it a day. Those stars were in a patch of space that was in a permanent state of spatial flux, not because of a massive gravitational well that such a cluster of stars creates, but because no matter how many times they tried to observe the area with what little sub-space telescope they had assembled onboard, they could never find any evidence that there was anything more then a collection of super-heated dust that for some reason never collected into stars, yet still showed signs of having massive gravity wells with a giant whole in the center of it all where there was just nothing. A place devoid of space, matter and even time. The whole field was a perplexing mystery, yet for some reason, Naomi kept staring at it with such sadness in her eyes.

"...Even members of or own crew, have been erased." Jainway froze. What did she just say!

"You don't remember them...because they've been erased from the very fabric of time itself." She tilted her head back and let her eyes look into the light fixed within the ceiling. "The Starship_ Voyager_, stardate 54179. Crew Compliment: one hundred seventy-seven." One hundred seventy-seven! But, that means that at least thirty-four members of her crew were gone! All of them just simply erased from the time line? She couldn't believe it; it was all just too incredible! But then Naomi shifter her gaze back to her; the depth of her eyes now so far, and filled to the brim with pain.

"Haven't you ever wondered captain, why on a ship that was built to carry a usual operational crew of about two hundred and fifty would only be sent out on a mission to track-down a simple raider's vessel with only three-fifths that? Why there are so many empty rooms on board this ship?" She turned to the rest of the crew and said: "Have any of you?" It was true; she'd never really thought about it before, but she was right...why had Starfleet sent them out like this? Sure in the long-run it's all worked out to their advantage, but the question still remained. Then the young Wildman hardened her gaze on her and the crew.

"I'll tell you why: It's because originally, we weren't. When _Voyager_ first entered the Delta-Quadrant, we had a crew of two-hundred and forty-one, and over the years, thirty-nine people have died in our journey home. And..." She paused in her explanation of what had happened. The captain hadn't noticed it before, but there was something in her hand. A small cylindrical device, which was charred and burned black and part of it blasted off. Naomi looked at it with pain and sadness in her eyes.

"...Now, they've become nothing more then caualties...casualties of a war that no one can remember. Except for me, and that man...that lonely angel."


End file.
